The previous months and weeks, I’ve been busy with some projects for both web and print. The print projects have my full attention at the moment and so I wanted to share some of the things I’m making for a client. Because I cannot share the name of the client, i have replaced the logo with my own, hope you don’t mind. I’m going to show how I did the style guide for this project. A style guide can be a really helpful guide. For me, it is an anchor point to refer to when I’m busy designing for the same client. It helps me focus on the colors, the style, the elements that are important when building an identity for print and web. I designed this style guide with Adobe InDesign.

Recently, I rediscovered a book I bought when I was in first grade of art school. It made me think of the times we had to discover patterns and inspiration from that book as students. Now, so many years later, the plates are still incredibly rich and the book is a very good inspiring tool for graphic design also. If you look for patterns, for (irregular) shapes, for logo inspiration, poster inspiration, etc.. Even for a webdesigner, you can find lots of inspiration from the book to make bullets, header shapes and so on.

A bird shape is not that difficult to draw with regular shapes in Illustrator. With a circle, a rectangle and a oval you’ll get a bird shape really quick. I’ll show you how I did this in Illustrator and made a wallpaper with this bird shape.

A new wallpaper for the month of July 2009 is available for download.

I made them in 2 different options: with a calendar for July 2009 and without calendar.

The last couple of weeks, I redesigned a few websites. This websites existed for a few years but needed a redesign. The fact that they were initially made in Flash came also into play. The website owners asked me to convert them into websites with a back-end that they can administer. For all of these website, I used ExpressionEngine as CMS.

In this first screencast we demonstrate how easy it is to create and send mail campaign yourself using our mailmarketing platform BeneMailer

Emailmarketing is an essential part of your marketing mix, send your nicely layouted message to your subscribers and monitor the results.  Some essentials you need to know about mailmarketing.

Some points in my schedule are essential to me for every new project. Here’s how i plan new projects. It is essential for an independent web designer - like myself - to have it as smooth as possible, your project and client will benefit from a good preparation and open communication. But how do you prepare for a project and how do you set goals?

A new wallpaper for the month of May 2009 is available for download.

A quick way to navigate through websites on your iPhone is with custom icons. If you have a Home Screen on your iPhone dedicated to websites you frequently visit, it is nice when the website has a custom icon. So I decided to make a custom icon for this website. With just 1 line of code and a .png file the job is done.